Steven Slater is the now-famous JetBlue flight attendant who went berserk at Kennedy International Airport in New York last week, cursing at passengers through the plane’s sound system and grabbing a beer from the galley before he made his theatrical egress via the inflatable escape slide to the tarmac. After fleeing to his home in Queens, he was arrested on felony charges and later released on $2,500 bail.
CBS News subsequently described him as “something of a modern folk hero.” The Los Angeles Times elevated him to an “international celebrity” as well.
I don’t regard Slater as a hero, just a childish jerk. All of us have had bad days on the job. Sometimes, it’s someone else’s fault and sometimes it’s our own. We might fantasize about acting on the late country singer Johnny Paycheck’s advice in his 1977 hit “Take This Job and Shove It.” But in the real world, most of us suck it up and get over it.
A job is a two-way voluntary relationship between you and your employer. Involuntary servitude in the U.S. was outlawed by the 13th Amendment in 1865 after the Civil War. If you truly hate your job, it’s your prerogative to walk away and find another. Or you can hang around and bitch about it as if the world or your boss owes you a living. This is the mentality of malcontents and slackers.
Jobs that entail contact with the public can often expose workers to rudeness and misplaced aggression from the people they deal with. Waiters, cab drivers, tax collectors, cops, politicians, baseball umpires and, yes, flight attendants, to name just a few, regularly experience this. It goes with the job. Al-Qaeda terrorists can be particularly inconsiderate on airplanes. At other times, it might be members of the public who are abused by a surly clerk at the airline ticket counter or the motor vehicle bureau. Welcome to life.
Slater’s petulant behavior resulted in lengthy delays, since the escape chute had to be inspected and reinstalled. Passengers missed connecting flights. Flights all over the system may have been delayed to accommodate the JFK passengers. All because Slater, the “hero,” was having a hissy fit.
I say “hissy fit” advisedly. As another wrinkle to the story, because Slater is openly homosexual, gays at the Buck 15 Lounge in Miami threw a party in his honor a few days after the incident. What in the world does this have to do with gay rights or gay pride? Why would gays reflexively come to his defense? If anything, Slater is a liability to the gay rights movement. (Ironically, he bears an uncanny resemblance in name and appearance to Steven Stucker, the actor who played “Johnny,” the hilarious, presumably gay air-control assistant to Lloyd Bridges in the 1980 classic movie parody “Airplane.”) Slater’s behavior plays to every negative, cliched stereotype of homosexual males.
reports that Stone Entertainment has approached Slater’s lawyer with an offer for Slater to host a new reality TV show featuring disgruntled employees quitting their jobs in “extravagant ways.” This is what Andy Warhol envisioned with his 1960s prophecy that, in the future, everyone would have his 15 minutes of fame. A cynical bromide claims that no good deed goes unpunished. In this case, the corollary must be no bad deed goes unrewarded.
The term “hero” is often used these days to appropriately recognize the contributions and sacrifices of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a sad commentary on at least a part of our society when it’s used to describe the likes of Steven Slater.
Mike Rosen’s radio show airs weekdays from 9 a.m. to noon on 850-KOA.
